Christopher Columbus and Cultural Genocide of Sexuality and Gender Diversity

While the landing of Christopher Columbus in 1492 was initially cited to celebrate Italian American heritage in San Francisco in 1869, and later unofficially commemorated in several cities and state-wide in Colorado in 1907, the second Monday of October each year was designated in 1937 nationally as Columbus Day.

From its very inception, Columbus Day holding the status as a nationally recognized holiday and the figure of Christopher Columbus has been challenged by historians and other civil and human rights activists. They reasonably argue the immorality and violation of overriding tenets of social justice and conscious attempts at historical revisionism by raising Columbus, who unleashed widespread violence, raping, kidnapping, human enslavement, murderer, and land and property theft to the status of a national hero.

More recently, several states and local municipalities have redesignated the second Monday in October as Indigenous Peoples’ Day to honor the traditions and accomplishments of the original peoples in the lands known today as “the Americas” and at least acknowledging the genocidal slaughter of indigenous bodies and cultural traditions perpetrated by European colonialists under the guise of “civilization” justified by a Christian God.

Polytheism and Monotheism

Many ancient and non-Western cultures – including, for example, Hindu, most Native American, Mayan, and Incan cultures – base their religions on polytheism (multiple deities).

In general, these religious views seem to attribute similar characteristics to their gods. Particularly significant is the belief that the gods are actually created, and they age, give birth, and engage in sex. Some of these gods even have sexual relations with mortals.

The universe is seen as continuous, ever-changing, and fluid. These perspectives often lack rigid categories and understand nuance and diversity, which are particularly true of gender categories, which become mixed and often ambiguous and blurred. For example, some male gods give birth, while some female gods possess considerable power.

For example, the Hindu deity, Sri Ardhanarishvara, transcends gender norms and manifests multiple combinations of sex and gender.

In contrast, monotheistic Abrahamic (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) religions view the Supreme Being without origin, for this deity was never born and will never die. This Being, viewed as perfect, exists completely independently from human beings and transcends the natural world.

In part, such a Being has no sexual desire, for sexual desire, as a kind of need, is incompatible with this concept of perfection. This accounts for the strict separation between the Creator and the created.

Just as the Creator is distinct from His creation, so too are divisions between the Earthly sexes in the form of strictly defined binary sexes and gender roles. This distinction provides adherents to monotheistic religions a clear sense of their designated socially constructed roles: the guidelines they need to follow in relation to their God and to other human beings.

The socially-constructed binary and hierarchical views within a Western cosmology represent a major connecting factor within the varying forms of oppression. The socially-constructed “races” of “white” is seen as good, “people of color” as bad, and “light” as good or adroit (whose root comes from droit, in French meaning “right”) and “dark” as bad and sinister (sinister comes from Latin for “left”).

“Male” is depicted as leader and good, “female” as subservient and inferior; “heterosexual” as good, “homosexual” as bad,” and “heterosexual” perceived as love and “homosexual” as sex. Within this framework, gender identity and expression must connect directly with the sex of the individual assigned at birth.

“Christian” is considered” good, “non-Christian” judged bad; “rich” as good and virtuous, “poor” often as bad and lazy; people of, say, 21 to about 50 as good and in their “prime” versus under 21 as irresponsible and untrustworthy and elders as “over the hill” and “no longer sexual” or “valuable.”

“Able bodied” as good, “people with disabilities” as unfortunate, once also seen as punished by the Devil for past transgressions, possibly in a former life.

We have seen the many and severe consequences of bifurcated world views, where historically governmental and religious authorities have literally killed people for stepping out of their prescribed roles (for example, Joan of Arc for transgressing her assigned gender expression).

Parents and doctors physically mutilated intersex infants in their misguided attempts to “fix” them into one side or the other into a gender binary; where doctors and family members involuntarily committed lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people to psychiatric wards, forced “hormone” treatments, electroshock therapy, and even frontal lobotomies.

Christopher Columbus Unleashed Indigenous Cultural Genocide

Europeans on the North and South American continents established their domination based on a program of exploitation, violence, kidnapping, land theft, and genocide against native populations. For example, the “Puritans” left England to the Americas to practice a “purer” form of Protestant Christianity.

They believed they were divinely chosen to form “a biblical commonwealth” with no separation between religion and government. They tolerated no other faiths or interpretations of divine precepts. In fact, they murdered and expelled Quakers, Catholics, and others.

The “American” colonies followed European perceptions of “race.” A 1705 Virginia statute, the “Act Concerning Servants and Slaves,” read:

[N]o negroes, mulattos or Indians, Jew, Moor, Mahometan [Muslims], or other infidel, or such as are declared slaves by this act, shall, notwithstanding, purchase any christian (sic) white servant….

In 1790, the newly constituted United States Congress passed the Naturalization Act, which excluded all nonwhites from citizenship, including Asians, enslaved Africans, and Native Americans, the later whom they defined in oxymoronic terms as “domestic foreigners,” even though they had inhabited this land for thousands of years.

The Congress did not grant most remaining Native Americans rights of citizenship until 1924 with the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act, though Asians continued to be denied naturalized citizenship status.

An example of “cultural genocide” can be seen in the case of Christian European American domination over indigenous peoples, whom European Americans viewed as “uncivilized,” “godless heathens,” “barbarians,” and “devil worshipers.”

White Christian European Americans attempted to destroy indigenous peoples cultures through many means: confiscation of land, forced relocation, undermining of their languages, cultures, and identities, forced conversion to Christianity, and the establishment of Christian day schools and off-reservation boarding schools far away from their people.

The first off-reservation Indian boarding school was established in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1879 and run primarily by white Christian teachers, administered by Richard Pratt, a former cavalry commander in the Indian Territories.

At the school, Indian children were stripped of their culture: the males’ hair was cut short, they were forced to wear Western-style clothing, they were prohibited from conversing in their native languages and English was compulsory, all their cultural and spiritual symbols were destroyed, and Christianity was imposed.

As Pratt related to a Baptist audience:

[We must immerse] Indians in our civilization, and when we get them under, [hold] them there until they are thoroughly soaked.

Between 1879 and 1905, 25 Indian boarding schools operated throughout the United States.

Civilizing” Indians became a euphemism for Christian conversion. Christian missionaries throughout the United States worked vigorously to convert Indians. A mid-19th century missionary wrote: “As tribes and nationals the Indians must perish and live only as men, [and should] fall in with Christian civilization that is destined to cover the earth.

Throughout the Alaska territory, Christian missionaries, including Presbyterians, Catholics, Moravians, vied to win converts. Simultaneously, the United States government issued laws barring Alaskan Indian ceremonies regarded as “pagan” and contrary to the spread of Christianity.

The expansion of the republic and movement west was in part justified by a philosophical underpinning since the American Revolution. Called “Manifest Destiny,” it was based on the belief that the Protestant Christian God intended the United States to extend its holdings and its power across the wide continent of North America over the native Indian tribes from the east coast to the west.

During the early years of the new republic, with its increasing population and desire for land, political leaders, such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, advocated that Indian lands should be obtained through treaties and purchases.

President Jefferson in 1803 wrote a letter to then Tennessee political leader, Andrew Jackson, advising him to convince Indians to sell their “useless” forests to the U.S. government and become farmers. Jefferson and other government leaders overlooked the fact that this style of individualized farming was contrary to Indian communitarian spiritual/cultural traditions.

Later, however, when he inhabited the White House, Jackson argued that white “settlers” had a “right” to confiscate Indian land. Though he proposed a combination of treaties and an exchange or trade of land, he maintained that whites had a right to claim any Indian lands that were not under cultivation. Essentially, Jackson recognized as the only legitimate claims for Indian lands those on which they grew crops or made other “improvements.”

The Indian Removal Act of May 28, 1830 authorized President Jackson to confiscate Indian land east of the Mississippi River, “relocate” its former inhabitants, and exchange their former land with territory west of the River. The infamous “Trail of Tears” spawned by Jackson continued until the end of the 1830s and beyond, attests to the forced evacuation and redeployment of entire Indian nations in which many died of cholera, exposure to the elements, contaminated food, and other environmental hazards.

Throughout the centuries, the United States government has broken numerous treaties it had forced onto indigenous peoples. European Americans can never reverse the damage perpetrated upon these noble peoples.

But we can begin, at least, by dumping Christopher Columbus into his rightful place of historical infamy and commemorate Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

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